One parent's quest for control

August 01, 2006|MARC FISHER The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Each fall, when Montgomery County, Md., high schools send home the list of families who have signed the Safe Home Pledge, Nancy Murray studies the document as if it were holy writ. "You better believe I examine it," says Murray, a Burtonsville, Md., mother of four. The families on the list have agreed to abide by these rules for their teenagers: 1) I will supervise parties or gatherings in my home. 2) I will welcome calls from other parents when my child is hosting a party or gathering. 3) I will call the parents for a Safe Home confirmation when my child is attending a party or gathering. 4) I will not allow or serve alcohol, tobacco or other drugs in my home or on my property. Lots of parents sign the pledge, often because of peer pressure: If everyone else is signing, how would it look if your name were not on the list? Who opposes keeping kids safe? But it's something else entirely to pick up the phone and call other parents, especially when your kid is 15, 16, 17 years old. Nancy Murray calls. She calls even though her kids are "so embarrassed." She calls even when -- especially when -- she doesn't know the parents who are hosting the party. She calls and runs through her questions: Will you be there? Will you be in the room? Will you be checking who comes in the door? The host parents answer, sometimes readily, sometimes grudgingly. But, however the parent on the phone responds, Murray has concluded, "you really don't know, no matter what they say." Murray, who has two kids in high school and two already finished, has learned not to trust other parents, even those she knows fairly well. "These are people I socialize with," she says. "And they say, 'Well, they're going to drink anyway, they might as well do it at my house, where I can watch them and know they're safe.' I tell them that's against our rules, and they say, 'Oh, you're being naive.' " Somewhere deep inside, Murray began to wonder if maybe those other parents were right. When the Murrays' daughter Meagan turned 17, she wanted to have a birthday party at the family's house. The Murrays were anxious about maintaining control of 40 17-year-olds, but "you do want your kids to socialize," Murray says. So the parents green-lighted the party, with all the precautions they could think of. "We made kids leave their jackets at the front door," Murray recalls. "We had a coat rack -- short of searching them, what else could we have done? Everyone knew the rules -- no alcohol. We were there the whole time. We made ourselves obvious. There wasn't one more thing we could do." And still, she learned later, some kids managed to sneak alcohol into the house. One other thing sticks with Murray about that party: Not one parent called ahead to check out the situation. "Not one. We call them, but they don't call." Still, Nancy and Thomas Murray stick to their rules. Anything less, they believe, would be an abdication of their role. One night when the Murrays were out for the evening, their daughter called on the cell to ask if a couple of friends could come over to the house. Even though Murray had known those friends since they were in elementary school, she didn't want them hanging out at her house without adult supervision. So when the kids arrived at the door, the daughter explained that she was sorry, but her parents had said no. The visiting kids left and ended their night in trouble: There had been drinking, and one teen capped his night with a visit to the emergency room from all the alcohol he'd consumed. Later, that boy's mother called Murray. The mother was tracing her son's movements, asking questions as if Murray were to blame, somehow, for not stopping her child from drinking. "She wanted to hold us responsible for not calling her or not helping her son," Murray says. In another mother's mind, this most responsible and conscientious of parents was now somehow suspect. "And of course we didn't know what those kids were doing. We only knew that we had made a choice for our kid. You know, parents do want somebody to blame."